Black Forest sanctuary for IS-abused Yazidi women

After surviving torment and rape at the hands of her Islamic State captors, Nadia Murad rebuilt her life at a trauma centre in Germany’s Black Forest which became her sanctuary. It was here alongside hundreds of other Yazidi victims of IS abuse and terror that Murad found her voice and started the journey that saw her honoured with this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Thousands of kilometres (miles) from their war-battered homes in northern Iraq’s Sinjar region, 1,100 women and children of the Kurdish-speaking minority were resettled here. The psychologically scarred women are escaped IS captives who were chosen for an emergency asylum programme set up in 2014 by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The women, many of whom were sold as IS slaves, have since received trauma counselling for rape, a taboo subject in the Middle East, under the guidance of Kurdish-German psychologist Jan Ilhan Kizilhan. “At the beginning here it was very difficult,” said one of them, Lewiza, speaking in a monotone voice about her culture shock when she arrived three years ago. “I was always afraid, I thought I was going to fall back into the hands of Daesh,” she said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadi militant group. – ‘Everything was new’ – The 22-year-old, who declined to reveal her full name, had to rebuild her life from scratch in this picturesque and prosperous corner of Germany near the Swiss border. “Everything was new to me: undergoing therapy, talking to someone about my condition,” she told AFP…. [Read full story]